The Making and Unmaking of a Saint

Hagiography and Memory in the Cult of Gerald of Aurillac

By Mathew Kuefler

Publication Year: 2014

A crusader, a hermit, a bishop, a plague victim, and even a repentant murderer by turns: the stories attached to Saint Gerald of Aurillac offer a strange and fragmented legacy. His two earliest biographies, written in the early tenth and early eleventh centuries, depicted the saint as a warrior who devoted his life to pious service. Soon Gerald was a venerated figure, and the monastery he founded was itself a popular pilgrimage site. Like many other cults, his faded into obscurity over time, although a small group of loyal worshippers periodically revived interest, creating sculpted or stained glass images and the alternate biographies that complicated an ever more obscure history.

The Making and Unmaking of a Saint traces the rise and fall of devotion to Gerald of Aurillac through a millennium, from his death in the tenth century to the attempt to reinvigorate his cult in the nineteenth century. Mathew Kuefler makes a strong case for the sophistication of hagiography as a literary genre that can be used to articulate religious doubts and anxieties even as it exalts the saints; and he overturns the received attribution of Gerald's detailed Vita to Odo of Cluny, identifying it instead as the work of the infamous eleventh-century forger Ademar of Chabannes. Through his careful examination, the biographies and iconographies that mark the waxing and waning of Saint Gerald's cult tell an illuminating tale not only of how saints are remembered but also of how they are forgotten.

Contents

Note on Names

Maps 1 and 2

Introduction: Hagiography, Memory, History

High up in the French Alps, near the end of a twisting mountain road that
snakes farther and farther up a steep mountainside from the village of Aurisen-
Oisans, sits the medieval chapel of Saint-Giraud. No record survives of its
origins: its first mention dates from 1454, when the bishop of Grenoble
stopped there on his visitation...

1. Prolegomenon on the Dating and Authorship of the Writings about Gerald of Aurillac

Gerald of Aurillac is a familiar figure to scholars of the central Middle Ages,
and his life has provided rare and intriguing glimpses into this era: its forms
of individual piety, the relations between peasants and landowners, the methods
of justice, and even the banality of violence. The traditional dating and
attribution of the texts...

2. The First Saint Gerald

The earliest remembrances of Gerald come from one of the most prominent
monastic reformers of the central Middle Ages, Odo of Cluny. This is, once
again, the Vita brevior (an English translation of which appears in Appendix 1
from my own critical edition) and not the better-known Vita prolixior. Why
a man so devoted to the monastic...

3. The Second Saint Gerald

Almost a century after Odo composed his Vita brevior, Ademar of Chabannes,
writing from Limoges in the 1020s, extended the textual tradition on
Gerald in a number of ways. He began by adding a brief account of Gerald’s
death and a half-dozen stories of Gerald’s posthumous miracles to the existing
vita. Perhaps he hoped to dispel the doubts...

4. Saint Gerald and the Swell of History

Odo and Ademar both struggled to define Saint Gerald’s memory in crucial
if fundamentally contrary ways. Even if hagiographers initiated a saint’s reputation,
though, only the response of the devout could sustain it over time.
What can be pieced together of the history of devotion to Saint Gerald demonstrates
the varied...

5. Saint Gerald and the Ebb of History

Despite the manifold efforts to advance the cult of Saint Gerald, he was
slowly sinking into obscurity by the end of the Middle Ages. Insofar as we
know, in the fifteenth century only one new manuscript included his vita
and only one church was built in his name.1 Nonetheless, even the disappearance
of the cult of a saint...

6. The Modern Cult of Saint Gerald

The French Revolution seemed to signal the end of the cult of Saint Gerald.
Yet the churches dedicated to Saint Gerald were closed for less than a decade,
and when the Catholic religion was restored in France in 1801 Saint Gerald
returned to Aurillac and to thirty or so of his other churches across southern
France. With the dispersion of the last canons...

Conclusion: Memory, Sanctity, Violence

Saint Gerald is virtually unknown today except to scholars of the Middle
Ages. He no longer functions convincingly as a saint. Vestiges of Gerald’s
saintly memory still linger at Aurillac and also in the towns and villages where
his churches still stand, although many of the residents with whom I spoke
during my travels were hard pressed...

Appendix 1: Translation of the Vita sancti Geraldi brevior

Here begins the prologue to the life of the man of God, Gerald, [whose feast
day is] 13 October, related by the Lord Abbot Odo.
To the Reverend Father and Lord Abbot Aimon, his fellow servant of
the brothers and the most insignificant of abbots,1 Odo sends perpetual greetings
in the Lord. You have asked...

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I have benefited from the generous help of many, including in France at the
Bibliothe`que nationale de France, the Institut des recherches et d’histoire des
textes, the Bibliothe`que de l’Arsenal, and the Bibliothe`que Sainte-Genevie`ve,
all in Paris; the Archives de´partementales across France in Alpes-de-Haute-
Provence...

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